World Happiness Report

by Mercy Nyambura Kariuki

Context

The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness. The first report was published in 2012, the second in 2013, the third in 2015, and the fourth in the 2016 Update. The World Happiness 2017, which ranks 155 countries by their happiness levels, was released at the United Nations at an event celebrating International Day of Happiness on March 20th. The report continues to gain global recognition as governments, organizations and civil society increasingly use happiness indicators to inform their policy-making decisions. Leading experts across fields – economics, psychology, survey analysis, national statistics, health, public policy and more – describe how measurements of well-being can be used effectively to assess the progress of nations. The reports review the state of happiness in the world today and show how the new science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness.

Content

The happiness scores and rankings use data from the Gallup World Poll. The scores are based on answers to the main life evaluation question asked in the poll. This question, known as the Cantril ladder, asks respondents to think of a ladder with the best possible life for them being a 10 and the worst possible life being a 0 and to rate their own current lives on that scale. The scores are from nationally representative samples for the years 2013-2016 and use the Gallup weights to make the estimates representative. The columns following the happiness score estimate the extent to which each of six factors – economic production, social support, life expectancy, freedom, absence of corruption, and generosity – contribute to making life evaluations higher in each country than they are in Dystopia, a hypothetical country that has values equal to the world’s lowest national averages for each of the six factors. They have no impact on the total score reported for each country, but they do explain why some countries rank higher than others.

Stage 1: Data Acquisition

Get the Data

Stage 2: Data Wrangling

Let's map countries to regions

2015 and 2016 have a Region Column. 2017 doesn't have Region column. 2018 and 2019 have a Country or Region column where the values are country names.

We will pick region codes from happiness2015 and add Region to happiness2019, happiness2018 and happiness2017.

All the data sets have different column names. Let's also standard the column names as below:

  • "Rank"
  • "Country"
  • "Region"
  • "Happiness Score"
  • "GDP per Capita"
  • "Social Support"
  • "Health (Life Expectancy)"
  • "Freedom"
  • "Trust"

2019

2018

2017

2016

Check column names are the same in all the dataframes

Check for Null values in the dataframes

happiness2018 ahd happiness2019 have inconsistent values.

Let's view which columns have the Null values

Let's fix the null values of happiness2018

Map Null region based on the region of nearby contry

Show a list of the countries with null values

Map Regions based on the nearest neighbor

For example, Namibia: South Africa

Northern Cyprus: Cyprus

etc

Check is Null values are mapped correctly

Let's fix the Null values in happiness2019.

Show the Regions with Null values

Map Regions based on the nearest neighbor

Check is the Null values are present

Stage 3: Data Visualization

The Happiness Score is varies depending on 6 factors:

  • Economy
  • Health
  • Family
  • Freedom
  • Generosity
  • Trust

Plotly

-Happiness Scores is consistently correlated with Economy & Health factors, i.e. more developed the country is economically and with better healthcare, higher the scores.

  • Most Continents are unevenly distributed as Regions, and some countries have missing scores across years, so Average Happiness score has been used.

  • Random Observation: Top Happy Countries are clustered away from Equator line, also where population density is lower. Since population parameter is not observed in the dataset, no correlation can be clearly drawn.

  • Factors like “years since last war/insurgency”, “ecological ownership of nature”, “freedom in terms of democracy & human rights” could be introduced as qualitative aspects in scoring Happiness.